Category: Books

1. Ice, by Vladimir Sorokin.  A totally lurid, highly sexed, contemporary Russian, pre-apocalyptic mix of science fiction and horror.  I finished it.

2. The Once and Future King, T.H. White.  Oddly absent from Law and Literature syllabi, I’m teaching this in my next class.  This is many people’s favorite book.  It’s written in a simple manner, but it cumulates in an oddly beautiful way.

3. What economists should learn from sociology, not to mention Arnold Kling on me, and Brad DeLong on Milton Friedman.

4. How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It, by Patricia Love and Steven Stosny.  The claim: talking about relationship problems is an inherently shameful activity for the man and thus it will fail; the couple should just read this book and do what is best.

5. Econoblog with Ed Glaeser and Daron Acemoglu, on democracy and economic growth.  If Greg Mankiw can debate Jacqueline Passey, Ed can cite Borat as evidence in a dialog with a world-class economist.

6. Invading Mexico: America’s Continental Dream and the Mexican War, 1846-1848 by Joseph Wheelan.  If you wish to embarrass your friends (and yourself), ask them whether they would in retrospect support the U.S. conquest of territory from Mexico.

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man to beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

– W.H. Auden

Bookslut will tell you "not," but you would be missing something special.  Most generally, revel in the language, the fun, and the set pieces.  Don’t look for deeper meanings, in my view there ain’t none, and for the better.  My specific tips:

1. V: Published when Pynchon was 24.  Read it once, straight through, without trying to make sense of it.  Then read it again.  Companion to V. is a useful supplement.

2. The Crying of Lot 49.  Short, fun, and somewhat scrutable.  It is a common introduction to Pynchon, although Pynchon himself dismisses its importance.

3. Gravity’s Rainbow: The masterpiece.  It doesn’t matter if you don’t finish it, the story falls apart in any case.  Even reading the first fifty pages yields a high return.

4. Vineland: This short novel came after a 17-year hiatus.  It has its defenders, but I find it unreadable and unpleasant.

5. Mason & Dixon: I love the 18th century, so you might think I could get into this one.  Pam Regis tells me it has to be read aloud.

6. Against the Day: The new 1200-page monstrosity.  How to read it?  Lean it against your sofa, and wait until your wife starts complaining about it, thereby prompting you to pick it up and get it out of the way…

The bottom line: Pynchon is about the highest-IQ author out there, a mixed blessing.  Start with Gravity’s Rainbow, or V, and hope for the best.

#15 in a series of 50.

Here is Brian on CatoUnbound, and here is Brian’s wonderful new book.  My provocative response will be up Monday; Brink Lindsey, Tom Palmer, and Virginia Postrel will be part of the symposium as well.

In 1999, a poor Colombian told me that his eighty-two years had finally dulled his fear of violence, which had tormented him because he had been robbed many times, once they’d cut his belly open — I requested his opinion of the rich — He clenched his fists and said: Oh, they don’t do nothing for the poor people!

The ones who had harmed him were poorer than he — and still he hated the rich.

That is from William Vollmann’s intermittently fascinating Poor People.  Here is an earlier post on Vollmann.

Should your library consist mostly of read books, or of unread books?  The avid and loyal MR reader will already know we are adjusting for "number of books read" in posing this query.

If you own mostly read books, you use your library for reference and remembrance.  Your collection is like Proust’s madeleine.  If you own mostly unread books, your library yields exciting discovery but also lots of clunkers.  Each step to the shelf offers a chance to redefine your life and your loves in unexpected ways, or perhaps crashing disappointment.

My (small) personal library is virtually 100 percent already read books, plus Gone With the Wind and Shantaram, both of which I am saving up for long plane trips to distant climes.  But I think of my real library as the local public library, which is still mostly unread books.

If you are one of those Austrian economists who believes in the all-importance of unquantifiable Knightian uncertainty, I hope your shelves are full of unread books (we now, by the way, have the means to make this otherwise murky concept operational).  Otherwise you are livin’ a dirty, stinkin’ lie.  Karmic retribution will be swift and, yes, certain.

For further musings on this topic, see Nassim Taleb’s new The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, a stimulating look at surprise.

Boo!

Here.

Full explanation here.

Pointers are from BookSlut and Yana.  What words do you wish to purge from your library?

1. Anarchy and the Law: The Political Economy of Choice, edited by Ed Stringham.  712 pages of debate about libertarian anarchy, just about everything intelligent written on the topic, and then some.  The book has two essays by yours truly on why libertarian anarchy cannot avoid reevolution back to government; you’ll also find them on my home page.

2. Daniel Drezner, All Politics is Global: Explaining International Regulatory Regimes.  An underexplored topic in public choice, Dan shows it still all boils down to national politics.  Here is chapter one.

3. Dan Simmons, The Terror.  One of his best books, a thrilling Arctic adventure, well-paced, 769 pp., but ultimately not conceptual.  My decision to stop reading at p.200 or so marks a watershed in my life.

4. Christoph Peters, The Fabric of Life.  A German vacationer witnesses a murder in Istanbul and delves into seamy society to figure out what happened.  It is so hard to get a translation into English published these days that a rule of reading only translated contemporary literature is one of the better filters.  Recommended.

5. Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows.  Reader’s feast of subtle and penetrating observations, dysfunctional family, etc.

6. Spence on Schelling, via Greg Mankiw.

7. Maybe I’m Amazed.

Radicalis for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, by Brian Doherty.  I hope to write more on this book for Cato, and they get first dibs on my thoughts.  But you all should know the book exists and is likely to prove the definitive history of its topic.

Here is Bryan Caplan on the book, which by the way even covers me.

No, I am not referring to other bloggers, I mean Allen Shawn (son of William, by the way, former editor of The New Yorker, and brother of actor Wallace).  He is deeply phobic, about many things, and his new Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life outlines the phenomenology of his fears.  I learned:

1. The greatest thing he has to fear is fear itself.

2. The imprinting of painful memories, such as knowing to avoid a lit fire, can backfire and create persistent phobias.  His phobias are remarkably specific.

3. There is a deep and poorly understood connection between phobias and the more general phenomenon of neurodiversity.

4. Self-awareness ain’t no guarantee of nuthin’.

5. He claims that people placed in concentration camps (Theresienstadt) became depressed, but that their phobias usually disappeared.

6. The author has a deep interest in atonal music, which supports my hypothesis that it is mostly the neurodiverse who enjoy this art form.  Other people simply can’t hear the patterns, and furthermore the music gets on their nerves.

Half of the discussion is deadly dull, but it is still one of the more interesting books so far this year.

The Science of Success: How Market Based Management Built the World’s Largest Private Company, by Charles Koch, due out this coming Tuesday.  This is Koch’s account of how the economics of Hayek and Polanyi (Michael, not Karl!) helped him do it.

Here is Mark Skousen’s class on free market management.  Here is a bibliography on Austrian economics and management.  Here is Hal Varian on Kaizen, recommended.

That is the title of this new book by Philippe Legrain, and no I don’t know how you can buy it outside the UK.  Legrain is also the author of the excellent Open World, a defense of economic globalization. 

This work is the single best non-technical defense of a liberal immigration policy.  What I liked most was how
it put U.S. debates in a broader context; most American sources don’t
do this.  For instance how normal or extreme is the American experience
compared to other histories of absorbing immigrants?  The book is original in this regard, yet without moving beyond easily
understood arguments.

I do understand the
concerns raised by Steve Sailer and others against immigrants, and I
readily grant that the idea of open borders is a non-starter.  But is
the United States today in a position where Latino immigrants are
tearing us apart?  I think not.

Yes I know your anecdotes, but here is what it would
take to budge me.  Do a study of real estate prices in San Diego, Santa
Ana (a largely Mexican part of Orange County), and the relevant
sections of Houston, among other locales.  Show me that real estate values in those areas
are falling or even plummeting, and yes I do mean in absolute terms and
no the recent collapse of the real estate bubble doesn’t count.  Then I’ll
give the issue another look.  Otherwise the worst I am going to believe is that "things are not getting better as rapidly as they might otherwise be," and that, whether or not you like such a possible state of affairs, does not represent the sky falling.

But for purposes of balance, here is the most anti-immigration post I have written.  Here is an interesting recent paper on migration.

Addendum: Here is a good article on immigrant entrepreneurs.

I’ve loved Rafael Yglesias’s book Dr. Neruda’s Cure for Evil for about ten years, but only Friday, when browsing in the library, did it occur to (silly) me it was also The Best Novel By A Father of A Major Blogger.

The story, told by literary flashback, turns around a doctor who encourages his patients to relive their childhood traumas but goes one step or more too far.  One review: "Entertaining, thought-provoking, shocking, enlightening, puzzling, this fascinating work
tackles many issues such as incest, insanity, the nature of love, the drive for power,
religious, business and political creeds, therapeutic ethics — and, of course, what (or who)
is evil."

Somehow, unjustly, the book never captured the "For Smart People Who Are Looking for Conceptual Yet Fun Fiction Along the Lines of Byatt, Eco, and Calvino" slot that grabs so many readers.  It seems largely forgotten. 

By the way, here is the son’s post on government contracting.  Here is yet another generation up.

…one of the major causes of higher priced new textbooks is the used
textbook market.  For example, if the fixed cost of producing a textbook
is $500,000 and 5,000 units of the book are sold each year for 4 years
then each textbook would bear $25 of the fixed cost.

However, if, due to the used textbook market, only the first 5,000
units are sold and, in each of the remaining three years these same
5,000 units are sold as used textbooks, then the publisher still has
the $500,000 in fixed costs spread out over only 5,000 books.  Thus each
new textbook bears $100 of fixed costs, resulting in higher retail
prices for all textbooks.  This example demonstrates what has been
happening in the textbook market over the past several years: As the
used textbook market has expanded so have the market prices of new and
used textbooks.

Here is more, but is that correct?  To the extent this is a superstars market, where the leader becomes a focal choice and earns rents, the downward price pressure won’t induce a proportionate supply reduction.  (There would be, however, less ex ante competition to obtain this spot, which may involve supply reductions.)  For less successful books, which inhabit a more competitive sector of the market where costs more likely bind, this analysis is more likely correct.

Paraphrasing Alex, I might note: "We know that textbook innovation saves lives and has a very high benefit to cost ratio.  Thus, price controls or other restrictions that reduce prices are almost certainly a bad idea."